Friends Who Are Going

Friends Attending

Friends Attending

Friends Attending

Description

Tom of Finland is the most important gay graphic artist of the 20th Century. Experience the craftsman abode he called home in Echo Park during an exclusive tour lead by Foundation docents and curators. The museum is a 1906 craftsman house poised on top a hill overlooking Echo Park. From 1981-1991 Tom split his time between this house in Los Angeles and his home in Finland's capital, Helsinki. He lived and worked in a studio space in the attic.

Born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, Tom of Finland's hyper erotic images have become icons of the gay community particularly in the uniform and leather fetish scenes. In 1984, Tom and his partner Durk Dehner started the non-profit Tom of Finland Foundation to preserve his work. Now it's also an international safe haven for homoerotic art and anti-censorship advocacy. His work, once censored as pornography, is now in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and published as a best-selling Taschen monograph. Rizzoli has just published a new monograph, Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles.

Notes for this Tour:

- Not recommended for adventurers under 18 years of age.

- Limited street parking is available on Laveta Terrace and in the surrounding neighborhood. Carpooling is highly recommended.

- Go Metro! Use the #2 Sunset or #4 Santa Monica buses, get off at Echo Park Boulevard and take the Laveta Stairs up.

- We will be viewing a large variety of highly graphic depictions of homoerotic nudity and sex.